Iris Murdoch

“We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”

“Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”

“In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.”

“The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.”

“One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.”

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

“Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.”

“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”